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Facebook and Twitter are becoming a 'red-hot' focus of Mueller's Russia investigation

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures as he arrives for a meeting with businessmen on the sidelines of the Russia-ASEAN summit in Sochi, Russia, May 20, 2016.

source

Reuters

Russia's
use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms to
spread fake news and propaganda during the 2016 election has
become a "red-hot" focus of FBI special counsel Robert Mueller's
investigation into Russia's election interference, Bloomberg reported
on Wednesday.

The news comes one week after Facebook shut down roughly 470
"inauthentic" accounts and pages that "were affiliated
with one another and likely operated out of Russia." Facebook
said in a statement that the accounts were connected to roughly
$100,000 in ad purchases between June 2015 and May 2017.

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Congressional investigators want to question Facebook and
Twitter representatives, too, and the Senate Intelligence
Committee is reportedly weighing whether to hold a public hearing
focusing on how Russia used social media to "manipulate"
voters.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment
Wednesday.

Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate
Intelligence Committee, told reporters last week that the social
media element of Russia's influence operation - which included
the hacks on the Democratic National Committee and Hillary
Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta - "opens a whole new
arena."

Warner added that he thought the advertisements the Russians
purchased were "just the tip of the iceberg." Facebook has since
confirmed that Russia-linked groups went further than ad buys and
memes, and tried to organize anti-immigrant, anti-Clinton rallies
in Texas and Idaho.

Russian "bots" posing as Americans also inundated Twitter during
the election, spreading anti-Clinton messages and material that
had been hacked from the DNC and Podesta.

A New York Times
analysis of the Russian social media fingerprints revealed
that "hundreds or thousands" of fake accounts on both Facebook
and Twitter contributed to the interference campaign.

Americans "ought to be able to know if there is foreign-sponsored
[internet] content coming into their electoral process," Warner
said last week. "That becomes a method of influence
exponentially, I would argue, bigger than TV and radio."

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House
Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he too was
"keenly interested in Russia's use of social media platforms,
both the use of bots and trolls to spread disinformation and
propaganda, including through the use of paid online
advertising."

Schiff told MSNBC last week that he also wanted to know how
sophisticated the ads were - in terms of their content and
targets - to determine whether they had any help from the Trump
campaign.

Facebook said in its statement that about 25% of the ads
purchased by Russians "were geographically targeted." Facebook
representatives told lawmakers behind closed doors Wednesday that
the ad sales had been traced back to a notorious Russian "troll
farm," according
to The Washington Post.

Warner said Thursday that while "we know about the hacking, as a
former tech guy, what really concerns me is that there were
upwards of 1,000 paid internet trolls working out of Russia
taking over computers, making botnets, and generating news down
to specific areas."